The long call of a little elephant

Artist Stephen Bush found Babar the Elephant to be the perfect vehicle for exploring Australia's post-colonial identity, writes Louise Bellamy.

Painter Stephen Bush has worked in a rundown shed at the back of his Ascot Vale house since 1988. And it's not only his address that has stayed the same. He's just completed the 24th version of an oil on linen titled Lure of Paris, which he describes as "a unique copy" of the first painting with the same title, content and form, painted in 1992.

The large work in grays and white is of three elephants in formal 19th-century attire cavorting over craggy rocks on a hostile coastline.

The fact they look like children's book and television character Babar the Elephant is no coincidence. After finding an abandoned, stuffed-toy Babar on a Geelong street, Bush researched the character. Learning that Babar, after the death of his mother, is taken to France to be "civilised" and then returns to Africa to "civilise" his fellow elephants, Bush thought the tale a brilliant tool with which to explore Australia's post-colonial identity.

"From the '60s," he says, "when many Australians felt the pull to Europe's sophistication and culture, through to the '90s and beyond, when the impact of white settlement on Aborigines started to spark regret and confusion".

Bush's work, painted straight onto the linen without underlying drawing, echoing the elegance of French Romantic Eugene Delacroix and the precision of French social realist Jean-Francois Millet, is often dubbed "narrative". And while the elephants, hovering in limbo on rocks, an amalgam of African and Western cultures, may seem logical enough, reading Bush's work has, more often than not, been likened to nutting out a cryptic crossword.

Bush is 46. His earliest work comprised desolate urbanscapes without people which were often compared to the work of Jeffrey Smart and Edward Hopper. Following a trip to the United States where, for seven months, he lived in a car and "did" the galleries, Bush's desire to explore post-colonisation took hold.

"The US doesn't have the doubt or insecurity we have about white settlement. It doesn't see itself as post-colonial, it doesn't have a queen on its money to start with."

Choosing the humble Pontiac potato, which he rendered larger than life in oil on linen "to symbolise the Australian landscape through the banter of the earth", Bush compiled a show which was exhibited at Connecticut's Aldrich Museum. Unfortunately, as well as attracting art lovers, it also attracted its fair share of (Pontiac) car buffs and interest, too, from local Indians, whose leader also shared the potato's name.

Later, back in Australia, he used himself as a narrator to make more didactic points about post-colonisation. With an old Pentax camera he had put on a 10-second delay, he would dress in 19th-century garb, representing white colonial settlers, run around madly and jump on a horse or make a grand gesture, then superimpose the photographic image in paint onto a barren, newly-discovered landscape.

"I also used photography as a means of being removed from the real experience and reducing the information to intensify the narrative," he says.

Influenced by the debate about whether the prices Aboriginal art was fetching in the United States was exploitative, his work became "almost judgemental' by the late '90s. In the painting Claiming, for example, two images of Bush, again photographed in 19th-century apparel, are intercepted by a larger-than-life sculpted image of Aboriginal painter Albert Namatjira's head.

"Shipping a painting in a crate to New York and selling the exotic is not selling the art," he explains. "What does Aboriginal work become when it's crated to the US?"

Now he looks at that work and wonders if he had the right to paint it. "The world is full of misplaced intentions," he muses.

His show features 20 paintings with new images of beekeepers, rubbish bins, alpine scenes and men on horses. In a post-modern world deluged with simulated images, Bush chooses to paint and re-paint similar - and slightly different - images "to push the meaning, push the viewer, force a response if I'm lucky".

There are large alpine landscapes, symbolising his on-going interest in the quest for self-discovery, painted with thick paint in flamboyant purples, pinks and limes. Some originated as clay models of icicles, which he later translated into paint; in another, he simply squeezed two tubes of paint onto the canvas to create the undulations.

Echoing the humour of his Lure of Paris works, two paintings, I Have Not Been Feeling Myself the Same and I Could Have Been Someone show photographic images of Bush on a horse in an urban and lunar landscape looking bemused, or lost, or somewhere in between.

The fact he sometimes uses only one colour, as in the beekeeper paintings, which depict a person, fully-clad in protective clothing like a factory worker, yet tending bees with remarkable care, gives the "narrative" focus.

Another recurring theme is the rubbish bin; in 1996, during an Australia Council residency in Paris, Bush, as well as making new paintings, drew hundreds of potatoes of various shapes and sizes, put them all in a green rubbish bin and watched as they were towed away. In this show are three such works, including one titled Sydney Biennale, in which a series of blue rubbish bins render "the junky exclusion zone around the museum nobody ever noticed while the show was going on".

Bush has been accused of upsetting the apple cart and playing serious games; he's also been lauded for capturing the contemporary Australian spirit, but as New York-based art critic Jonathan Goodman observed, "he's deeply serious about the role of art as witness". Which is why he keeps going back to his elephant painting, to ensure "I don't forget where that passion, all those years ago, began".

Stephen Bush's paintings are at Sutton Gallery, Fitzroy, until August 4.